Dinaw Mengestu on 'All Our Names'

In his new novel, Mengestu's characters reinvent themselves in the wake of a great migration and independence

March 21, 2014|By Kevin Nance

Dinaw Mengestu explores self-reinvention and dislocation in his new book "All Our Names." (Brian Harkin/Chicago Tribune)

Over the past decade, novelist Dinaw Mengestu has emerged as one of the brightest young chroniclers of the African diaspora. In his previous books, including "The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears" (2007) and "How to Read the Air" (2010), Mengestu explored the lives of Ethiopians forced by violent political upheaval to relocate in the United States — a migration mirrored by his own family, which fled war-torn Ethiopia when he was 2 and settled in Peoria and, later, Forest Park.

In his beautifully written new novel, "All Our Names," the author returns to his main themes of dislocation and self-reinvention with the story of a young man who leaves Ethiopia and gets caught up with revolutionary violence in Uganda in the early 1970s. Through the sacrifice of a charismatic friend who gives him his name and his passport, Isaac, as he becomes known, escapes to the United States. In a small town called Laurel, Isaac begins a new life and a passionate (though largely secret) love affair with a young social worker named Helen, which proves problematic both because of its interracial aspect and because Isaac is still wrestling with the demons of his past.

It's a powerful new addition to a growing list of accomplishments for Mengestu, one of The New Yorker magazine's "20 under 40" gifted young writers. He also received one of the National Book Award Foundation's "5 under 35" awards and, in 2012, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. Printers Row Journal caught up with Mengestu, 35, for a phone interview from his home in New York. (He commutes to Washington, D.C., one day a week to teach at his alma mater, Georgetown University.) Here's an edited transcript of our chat.

Q: What was the genesis of "All Our Names"?

A: I was living in Paris, and I suddenly had this idea of creating a group of close, young friends on a college campus somewhere in Africa. My first two novels had been around how the aftereffects of conflict and politics had forced people into migration. This one came out of an almost opposite desire: to see if I could create characters who had a sense of optimism, who were reinventing themselves because suddenly they were free to do so in the aftermath of independence. And from there, over the course of 51/2 years or so, it evolved and took on another voice.

Q: So let's set the scene. This book is set in Uganda in the decade after it had won its independence from Great Britain in the early 1960s. It wasn't clear at first what the government in Uganda was going to look like, so there was a sense of possibility.

A: That's right. There was a sense of optimism that was born out of not knowing what was going to happen. A lot of the leaders who came to power in Uganda and other African countries at the time were promising a shift to socialism, and Pan-African idealism was a large part of that. But less than 10 years later, there was a great series of power struggles. In Uganda, the first president, Milton Obote, was overthrown by Idi Amin. The people who came to power began to assume total control over the government and eliminate other political parties, freedom of expression and so on, and of course there was corruption. At the same time, in the United States, the civil rights movement was unfolding, so you had different forms of liberation materializing in different places in the world.

Q: In Uganda, as it became clear to young people that the promises of the revolution were not going to be fulfilled, there was a great deal of violence that began to occur.

A: Yes, there was a lot of violence, much of it quite extreme. People began to disappear for no apparent reason. I didn't intend a real depiction of that historical moment, but my story is very much informed by it.

Q: So Isaac — or the person known as Isaac — escapes to the United States, and settles in a small Midwestern town. But as you say, the civil rights movement was still going on at the time, so it was a case of out of the frying pan, into the fire.

A: Yeah. The civil rights legislation had been passed by that time, the Voting Rights Act had been passed, and yet on the day-to-day level of people's lives, not much had actually changed. There were still endemic forms of discrimination and racism, social and economic divisions between black and white. So for Isaac, even though he's escaped from the violence in Africa, he's now witnessing a form of the same thing — a sort of post-revolutionary depression, maybe.